Materialism can no longer
claim to be a scientific philosophy.Arthur Koestler, the renowned Social Philosopher.
1

How did the endless universe
we live in come into being?

How did the equilibrium, harmony,
and order of this universe develop?

How is it that this Earth
is such a fit and sheltering place for us to live in?

Questions
such as these have attracted attention since the dawn of the human
race. The conclusion reached by scientists and philosophers searching
for answers with their intellects and common sense is that the design
and order of this universe are evidence of the existence of a supreme
Creator ruling over the whole universe.

This is an indisputable truth
that we may reach by using our intelligence. Allah declares this
reality in His holy book, the Qur'an, which He inspired as a guide
for humanity fourteen centuries ago. He states that He has created
the universe when it was not, for a particular purpose, and with
all its systems and balances specifically designed for human life.
Allah invites people to consider this truth in the following verse:

Are you stronger in structure or is heaven?
He built it. He raised its vault high and made it level. He darkened
its night and brought forth its morning light. After that He smoothed
out the earth… (Surat an Naziat: 27-30)

Elsewhere it is declared in the
Qur'an that a person should see and consider all the systems and
balances in the universe that have been created for him by Allah
and derive a lesson from his observations:

He has made night and day subservient to
you, and the sun and moon and stars, all subject to His command.
There is certainly Signs in that for people who pay heed. (Surat
an-Nahl: 12)

In yet another verse of the Qur'an,
it is pointed out:

He makes night merge into day and day merge
into night, and He has made the sun and moon subservient, each one
running until a specified time. That is Allah, your Lord. The Kingdom
is His. Those you call on besides Him have no power over even the
smallest speck.(Surah Fatir: 13)

This plain truth declared
by the Qur'an is also confirmed by a number of the important founders
of the modern science of astronomy. Galileo, Kepler, and Newton
all recognised that the structure of universe, the design of the
solar system, the laws of physics and their states of equilibrium
were all created by Allah and they arrived at that conclusion as
a result of their own research and observations.

Materialism: A 19th-Century
Fallacy

The reality of the creation
of which we speak has been ignored or denied since the earliest times
by a particular philosophical point of view. It is called "materialism".
This philosophy, which was originally formulated among the ancient
Greeks, has also made an appearance from time to time in other cultures
and has been advanced by individuals as well. It holds that matter
alone exists and that it has done so for an infinity of time. From
these tenets, it claims that the universe has also "always" existed
and was not created.

In addition to their claim that
the universe exists in an infinity of time, materialists also assert
that there is no purpose or aim in the universe. They claim that
all the equilibrium, harmony and order that we see around us are
merely the product of coincidence. This "coincidence assertion"
is also put forward when the question of how human beings came into
being comes up. The theory of evolution, widely referred to as Darwinism,
is another application of materialism to the natural world.

We just mentioned that some of
the founders of modern science were faithful people who were in
agreement that the universe was created and organised by Allah.
In the 19th century, an important change took place in the attitudes
of the scientific world with respect to this matter. Materialism
was deliberately introduced to the agenda of modern science by various
groups. Because the 19th century's political and social conditions
formed a good basis for materialism, the philosophy gained wide
acceptance and spread throughout the scientific world.

The findings of modern
science however undeniably demonstrate how false the claims of materialism
really are.

The Findings of 20th-Century
Science

Let us recall the two assertions
of materialism about the universe:

The universe exists in infinite
time and, because it has no beginning or end, it was not created.

Everything in this universe
is merely the result of chance and not the product of any intentional
design, plan, or vision.

Those two notions were boldly advanced and ardently defended by
19th-century materialists, who of course had no recourse other than
to depend upon the limited and unsophisticated scientific knowledge
of their day. Both have been utterly refuted by the discoveries
of 20th-century science.

Modern science proves the reality of the creation of the universe
by Allah, contrary to what outdated materialist philosophy maintains.
Newsweek made "Science Finds God" the cover story of its July
27th 1998 issue

The first to be laid in
the grave was the notion of the universe existing in infinite time.
Since the 1920s, there has been mounting evidence this cannot be
true. Scientists are now certain that the universe came into being
from nothingness as the result of an unimaginably huge explosion,
known as the "Big Bang". In other words, the universe came into
being–or rather, it was created by Allah.

The 20th century has also
witnessed the demolition of the second claim of materialism: that
everything in the universe is the result of chance and not design.
Research conducted since the 1960s consistently demonstrates that
all the physical equilibriums of the universe in general and of
our world in particularly are intricately designed to make life
possible. As this research deepened, it was discovered each and
every one of the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, of the
fundamental forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, and of
the details of the structure of atoms and the elements of the universe
has been precisely tailored so that human beings may live. Scientists
today call this extraordinary design the "anthropic principle".
This is the principle that every detail in the universe has been
carefully arranged to make human life possible.

To sum up, the philosophy
called materialism has been utterly refuted by modern science. From
its position as the dominant scientific view of the 19th century,
materialism collapsed into fiction in the 20th.

How could it have been otherwise?
As Allah indicates "We did not create heaven
and earth and everything between them to no purpose. That is the
opinion of those who are disbelievers." (Surah Sad: 27) it
is wrong to suppose that the universe was created in vain. A philosophy
so utterly flawed as materialism and systems based on it were doomed
to failure from the very beginning.

Creation is a
fact. In this book we will be examining the evidence for this fact.
We will see how materialism has collapsed in the face of modern
science and also witness how wonderfully and perfectly the universe
has been designed and created by Allah.